From Wednesday 6 until Friday 8 of June 2012, Erasmus University
Rotterdam will host a conference on the subject of ‘interactive metal
fatigue’.

The conference aims to philosophically analyse the social and
psychological burden that today’s thoroughly interactive society
imposes on its members, through its unrelenting efforts to realise
emancipation and democracy. The success of the Enlightenment project
that turned emancipation and democracy into an incontrovertible part
of modern life, has produced ‘interactive metal fatigue’ as an
unforeseen and unintended consequence: the fatigue that follows upon
our realisation that we have placed a virtually unlimited duty of
emancipatory responsibility upon ourselves.

This guiding idea has been developed for the last couple of years in
the research programme ‘Interactive metal fatigue’ directed by Gijs
van Oenen, sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research NOW, and carried out at the Faculty of Philosophy of Erasmus
University Rotterdam. Initially, the research took its clues from the
notion of ‘interpassivity’, as developed by philosophers Robert
Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek, in the sphere of philosophy of art. Extended
and enriched through the notion of ‘interactive metal fatigue’, the
versatile concept of interpassivity has shown a surprising ability to
diagnose a variety of new phenomena in contemporary society in new and
productive ways.
The broad scope of the research topic will make the conference of
interest not only to philosophers, but also to many practitioners in
the social sciences and the humanities, as well as to those who deal
with issues in art and public space, or issues of policing and
governmentality. Cultural-psychological aspects of interpassivity,
like depression and narcissism, will also be addressed.

The conference will be relatively compact – we aim for some 65
participants in all – and will take place at an attractive location in
the city of Rotterdam.